THE DRAGON’S DANCE
A little less than two years after being honored with the GPHG Mechanical Exception Watch Prize, the young Geneva-based brand continues to dazzle with the beauty of the extraordinary time displays and perfect finishes of its pieces. This year, it’s the dragon’s turn to whisk us off into its hypnotizing dance.
Is this golden-scaled dragon, which sways poetically as time passes by, a mirage? Not at all… it’s for real and is the fruit of meticulous work which took three years of development and the marriage of several technical and artistic crafts and talents to complete. The result is striking, magical, never-seen-before. With this new GNS Dragon model, the young Geneva-based brand Genus, which was honored with the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève Mechanical Exception Watch Prize in 2019, whisks us off on a journey through the mystical symbolism which this imaginary creature, master of the four elements (water, fire, earth and air), epitomizing wisdom and infinity, portrays and, simultaneously, invites us to discover a new way of reading time.
The relief-styled dragon, protected in its miniature vivarium created by a sapphire-crystal dome, stretches out its sinuous body in an effortless, instinctive dance, forming circles which cross over shrewdly conjuring up the ethereal contour of a figure-of-8. Each of the 11 gold-crafted elements which it comprises, from its clawed feet to its snout enhanced by whiskers, was conscientiously hand-sculpted and -engraved. This hypnotizing ballet led by the animal’s head ticks over tens-of-minutes, whose more precise per-minute display features on a skeletonized disc at 3 o’clock. The peripheral satellite time is read at 9 o’clock via a vermillion-hued marker.
This feast-for-the-eyes is animated by the 160W-1.2 caliber, a Genus in-house designed and made hand-wound motor (2.5 Hz and a power reserve of 50 hours), with plate and bridges in RJC-certified gold, nestling inside a 43 mm-diameter and virtually 19 mm-thick gold case.
Price: CHF150,000 VAT-exclu. (price on request for the stone-set and/or bespoke versions)
By Sharmila Bertin